Killia (Disgaea 5) Fan-Art - Breakdown

For this project, I decided to take a stab at creating a cel-shaded style hand-painted character, and for this I decided to take a stab at my favorite character from Disgaea 5, Killia! For some reason, from the very start, I really liked his design, his demeanor, and his move-set in-game, so I'd never forgotten about him and wanted to give it a try. Ever since I saw him standing on the cover of the box art, I remember thinking "this guy looks so cool!"

This was actually my second project in between Fuka and Lilith.

Cover Art for Nippon Ichi's Disgaea 5 Game.

The primary things that I was looking forward to trying with the project were the following:

• Hand-painting a character similar to a cel-shaded style.

• Trying spiky hair for the first time.

• Trying fur for the first time.

• Making an attempt to combine on-model style with my own flourishes, which is why he seems so thin. I tried to stick close to Takehito Harada's art style. 

Admittedly, the hardest part of this entire project would have been Killia's hair. I had quite a time trying to understand how to do it. I hadn't learned how to do any spiky hair styles when I started this, and I truly had to learn some neat tricks to try and get it completed. I must have tried the hair and started over at least 2 or 3 times! 

A fun portion of the design that I enjoyed was creating the bat-like scarf wings. I knew that I wanted to create them as flat topology and hand-paint them, but I wasn't sure how it would turn out. I actually learned a neat trick in Cinema4D where I can have a flat plane available but configure two different materials on the same plane even though it's flat. That really impressed me, because I was able to get the blue on one side and the purple with assorted shading on the other without multiplying my poly count.

For this project, like the others I used the following software:

• 3DS Max: All of my character models begin as boxes in 3DS Max. I was able to take him from simple box to complete model.

• RizomUV: Once the character was modeled, I used Rizom to complete the cutting and organization of her UV Maps. I'll never stop recommending RizomUV as an app. It's, hands-down, the best way to get UV work completed. Please give it a try!

• Cinema4D: Despite trying a cel-shaded painting style, I stuck with my usage of Cinema4D. It just feels too good to drive for what I enjoy doing, haha.

• Akeytsu: Once again, I tried to get myself into rigging in Blender and I have plenty of materials to study to do so, but I will cite that it is tremendously busier to rig things in Blender as opposed to Akeytsu. I tried with Killia for a good few months before I found myself utterly sidelining the project. I put him in Akeytsu and his rig was complete in all of a week and he was posed.

  Despite the fact that the support for the software no longer exists outside of a small community, I think, for my uses, I will just stick with Akeytsu. It's hard to recommend because it essentially is out-of-support, but if you're looking for an easy way to rig and pose models, it's definitely good at that.

• Marmoset Toolbag 4: All of my renders and turntable videos were created using Marmoset Toolbag 4.

Killia was a great character to model and a cool project to finish. I had a great time with learning how to model that spiky hair, spikey fur, and the wings. Though, if I have to remind myself of anything else is that it is not a good idea to model things with overlapping geometry!

 The purple bits on the fingers are all overlapping Geo on top of the blue gloves of the hand and while trying to rig and weight paint these, I found myself in huge trouble because of it. This was definitely something I will never forget haha. Overlap geometry at your rigging peril!

I would like to thank my friends, Nohzro, Stoff, and Ghostlyfail for their amazing help as always with completing the model. They always give such great advice and I appreciate them a ton. I was definitely happy with this project.

I very well may use him as an experiment to try and implement some inverted hull things later on. I think he would be a great candidate for it, for sure!

Until next time, my friends! Thanks for taking the time to drop by and take a look!

Credits:

NIS America - Disgaea 5 Box art: Official Site